WWII vets featured in The Daily News share stories with Marines

It was the generation that inspired Cpl. Leslie Reyes to enlist in the Marine Corps and on Wednesday, she got to hear five World War II veterans tell their stories in person.

AMANDA HICKEY Daily News Staff

It was the generation that inspired Cpl. Leslie Reyes to enlist in the Marine Corps and on Wednesday, she got to hear five World War II veterans tell their stories in person.

Hugh Aderholt, Russell Bond, Bill Bass, Raoul Gagnon and Paul Tollefsrud spoke to Marines at the Single Marine Program Center aboard New River Air Station for nearly an hour before accepting questions from the crowd of more than 100 gathered. The presentation was a professional military education event aimed to share their experiences in the European and Pacific Theaters with today’s military.

Aderholt served in the Army and was a German prisoner of war for nearly 15 months after traveling from infantry training to North Africa to Naples, Italy.

He told the Marines about the battle of Monte Cassino, during which he and five others entered a house to search it and a tank fired two main gun rounds through the wall. The artillery shells, he said, “came in like rain” and even the Germans couldn’t get them out.

During his time as POW, he was forced to sleep in a shed full of hay and then he was moved to a prison camp outside of Florence. He stayed in many different camps and walked across Germany into Holland, he told the troops.

But when the American bombers flew above one of the camps, he remembers yelling at them to “give them hell boys”

“The Germans got mad, thought they were going to shoot us,” he said.

Bond told the troops about his 33 top secret combat flight missions over Europe with the Office of Strategic Service as a Carpetbagger, flights he wasn’t able to talk about for more than 40 years they were so top secret.

“When we would take off on a mission, we were told just what we needed to know to complete our operation, nothing more than that,” Bond said.

He and his eight brothers fought in World War II.

“None of us ever spoke as to what we did during World War II,” he said, explaining that he could not talk about it. “... My wife, my children they didn’t know what I did in the service.”

Bond said his family thought he participated in heavy bombardment missions until 1987 when they traveled to England to visit an old air field.

Tollefsrud served three years in the Marine Corps during World War II, signing up after joining a friend on his way to enlist.

The friend he enlisted with, Jack Peterson, died in Guadalcanal in November 1942, Tollesfrud told the Marines.

Tollefsrud said that his first flight as a divebomber was on his second day in Atlantic. The captain, he said, gave him a paper bag in case he “lost his cookies.”

After practicing a dive bomb from 5,000 feet “I said. ‘What the hell have they got me into?’,” he remembered.

He spent nearly a year in and around Midway picking up and circling submarines.

Bass is an Air Corps veteran who was drafted in 1943 at age 23.

He shared stories of two missions as a tail gunner during which things went wrong — one was a crash landing while the other was getting shot down while on a mission and parachuting into a tree.

“If we flew 35 missions we got to come home,” he said. “...Those last ones can be mighty rough.”

Gagnon spent 32 years in the Marine Corps and served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

“That gave me a score of three. I quit. I retired,” he told the group.

Gagnon said he couldn’t remember everywhere he’d gone and all he had done.

“Stick around and you’ll see the same,” he said.

However, he did remember going on a mission with two five-man teams. Team A was killed right in front of him.

The questions the Marines asked the men ranged from what they think of today’s military to if World War II movies depict the war accurately.

Aderholt said the movies show “a bunch of hooey.”

The Marines also asked the men what tools were available to help them transition from life as a warrior to life as a civilian.

“When I got back we got a job and from that point on, we didn’t talk about World War II,” Bond said.

The questions lasted nearly as long as the 50-minute presentation.

Reyes said that listening to the men speak was “a rush” after growing up watching military movies.

“Knowing these people are real, it inspires you. It inspired me to come into the Marine Corps,” she said.

Lance Cpl. Rudy Solomon said the presentation was very informative.

“I learned a lot about Marine Corps history that I did not know before. There was a lot of good insight in having someone who lived the history come back and share it with us,” he said.

He said he decided to attend the event because “you never get a moment like this.”

“I didn’t know if I’d get another so I came out,” he said.

If there’s a chance to do so in the future, Reyes recommends others attend events such as this.

“It’s a constant reminder of why we joined, the actions of the eras before,” she said.

The five men were selected after being featured in The Daily News in a series on World War II veterans written by military reporter Thomas Brennan who also spoke at the event.